Teju Cole’s Small Fates

When Teju Cole began work on his current project, a non-fiction narrative of Lagos, Nigeria, his African hometown and one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the world, he encountered a problem. He wanted to move beyond statistics to the experience of the individual Lagosian. But how to capture, in any meaningful way, the variety and abundance of life in the city? He began reading the daily newspapers (eleven in all), and found himself drawn to the small items—petty crimes, metro reports. Here, he thought, was Lagos in the raw. He determined to make use of the stuff, though he realized that it wouldn't quite fit the book.

He settled, as he describes in an essay in on his Web site, on the “fait divers,” a French innovation, used in newspapers for over a century, that translates to “incidents” or “various things” or just “fillers.” He provides an example, from 1906:

Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.

This, Cole says, “is not simply bad news. It is bad news of a certain kind, written in a certain way.” In an essay on the form called “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” Roland Barthes defined it as total or immanent information (containing nothing outside of itself): “Disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears.” Fait divers also have a “deranged” causality—the cause given for an event is not necessarily the right one—and they have an enigmatic tone, deflecting tragedy with a subtle humor.

To a contemporary reader like Cole, fait divers also have another characteristic: they are eminently tweetable. As he began to compose his own versions, which he calls “small fates” to differentiate them from the French, Cole realized they’d do well on Twitter. He’s been at it for a few months, and the results are riveting, providing a snapshot of life in Nigeria that invites and repels at once:

Precious Ogbonna, of Owerri, whom God gave 7 babies, nevertheless has an intact hymen, and has been charged with child-trafficking.

With a razor blade, Sikiru, of Ijebu Ode, who was tired of life, separated himself from his male organ. But death eluded him.

Most of the small fates read like inside jokes:

Pastor Ogbeke, preaching fervently during a storm in Obrura, received fire from heaven, in the form of lightning, and died.

But some are more accessible than others:

There were 119 first-class graduates from the University of Lagos this year, some of whom deserved it.

Mystery solved. According to the government, car wash operators are the major cause of flooding in Lagos.

It would be interesting to see the small fates woven into a larger narrative, and perhaps they will end up inflecting Cole's book on Lagos. Read one after another on Twitter, they seem to cry out for narrative context. But they also seem, in their kernel-like perfection, their mix of chaos, brutality, and humor, to pose a challenge to those who would try to manipulate them into a narrative line. It would require some careful stitching. But this, as James Wood wrote in the magazine of his début novel, “Open City,” which displays Cole’s taste for fragment, variety, and panorama, is what Cole excels at:

Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.

Readmore of Cole in The New Yorker, and watch a (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/video-teju-cole-on-coming-to-america.html) of him talking about his journey from Nigeria to America.

Note: This post originally stated that Teju Cole was writing small fates for his Lagos book; it was corrected to reflect that fact the projects are independent of one another.